Miami’s South Beach always has a pleasant buzz in winter, but during Art Basel Miami Beach the buzz is turned up to a loud roar as the entire international art world descends on a few blocks along the sand for what is, in essence, the world’s fanciest trade show.

Easy to forget amid the noise that a lot of truly great works have been assembled in a very small area. Here’s what you shouldn’t miss this week, from the best art on display to a star-studded Ping-Pong party at the Delano that sums up the heady mood on these shores.

1. The glitter-covered, brightly colored works of Mickalene Thomas have been making a splash for some time—First Lady Michelle Obama picked her to do an official portrait. Her reputation will only be helped by the display that New York gallery Lehmann Maupin has laid out at the main fair. The various works on offer feature African-American women in empowered, ultra-glamorous poses, managing to be beautiful enough to stop you in your tracks but thought-provoking, too.

2. Multimedia artist Doug Aitken enjoys a dark joke, and with Sex (2010) he’s outdone himself. The work, hanging outside the booth of L.A.’s Regen Projects, is essentially an overgrown terrarium in the shape of the most elemental three-letter word, with plants lushly filling up a plastic container and in some cases creeping out of it. Simple idea, but after you laugh the lingering effect is a little creepy.

3. On many of the works at ABMB, the paint is barely dry. But art from previous eras is a vital, if subtler, component of the fair. Make sure to check out glorious oldies like a Juan Gris Cubist still life, Moulin à Café et Bouteille (1917), tucked away in a corner of New York’s Helly Nahmad Gallery, and **Alice Neel’**s Mrs. Paul Gardner and Sam (1967), at New York’s David Zwirner, a typically penetrating portrait by a master of the genre and one of several Neels at the fair.

4. The honor of Party of the Week is a competitive one indeed, but the SPiN Galactic party at the Delano Hotel on Saturday night has potential—it has a dedicated absinthe bar, after all. The benefit for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami is being hosted by Susan Sarandon and the New York Ping-Pong club she founded, SPiN Galactic. In attendance will be Calvin Klein and Donna Karan, if RSVPs are to be believed.

5. Mexico City’s Labor gallery isn’t one of the bigger dealer names at the main fair, but it has brought one of the more haunting sculptures of the event. **Héctor Zamora’**s Credibility Crisis (2010) is an assemblage of sixteen tall fans, all whirring at top speed and all fitted with black wind socks. With the fans pointing away from one another in every direction from a central hub, this work expresses a feeling of confusion and aimlessness in the clearest terms.

6. For overall presentation, no booth beats that of New York’s Tony Shafrazi. Most of it is a jaw-dropping fun house devoted to the art of 67-year-old Robert Williams, an R. Crumb–like, go-for-broke artist whose comic-book style packs a punch. The booth is a riot of color and tightly packed psychedelic images on canvas, plus some enormous sculptures, including one of a nerdy stamp collector with a magnifying glass that’s more than eight feet tall. Bring the kids to this one, but be ready to selectively shield their eyes.

7. At Design Miami, just across the street from the main fair, you’ll be drawn to the warm and ingenious lighting of Lindsey Adelman in the booth of the New York gallery Matter. She plays off natural forms with the construction of her tubular lighting—the hardware is gold-colored metal attached at seemingly haphazard angles, and the combination of lights jutting out from one another resembles a branch or a set of antlers one moment and a cloud the next.

8. A cab ride away from South Beach is required to visit the Rubell Family Collection, one of the most edgy and important private museums in the country, but it’s well worth it for the unique event taking place there this week. Jennifer Rubell is staging a food performance artwork called Just Right from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. each day of the fair—but guests have to climb through a literal hole in the wall (busted through by Jennifer herself) behind the collection. Just Right is a “Goldilocks”-style conceptual breakfast buffet: Milk, raisins, brown sugar, and porridge are laid out in an abandoned-looking house for anyone who appreciates a little fairy-tale mystery in her morning.

9. Each year at least one work makes the fair visitor ask, How did he do that? In 2010 that question will be asked about **Evan Penny’**s Old Self (Portrait of the artist as he will not be), Variation #1 (2010), visible around a corner in the booth of New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery. Made of silicone, hair, and fabric, the bizarrely lifelike bust is how Penny imagines himself in 30 years, and you half expect it to start talking.

10. The Wolfsonian—the quirky design museum, now part of Florida International University, that helped spark the South Beach revival in the 1990s—is a year-round destination for art lovers, but this week it’s literally bugging out. The fearless Isabella Rossellini has created a series of short videos called Seduce Me, about animal seduction rituals, the follow-up to her Green Porno series on mating. “I turned myself into an animal,” says Rossellini matter-of-factly about the insects and cuttlefish whose come-ons she acts out with puppets and other visual aids, courtesy of artist Andy Byers. The video installation is on view through Sunday.